On a method of determining supports of Thoma's characters of discrete groups

We present a new approach to determining supports of extreme, normed by 1, positive definite class functions of discrete groups, i.e. characters in the sense of E. Thoma [8]. Any character of a group produces a unitary representation and thus a von Neumann algebra of linear operators with finite normal trace. We use a theorem of H. Umegaki [9] on the uniqueness of conditional expectation in finite von Neumann algebras. Some applications and examples are given